If you decide to send Frumkin to the Ukraine, Krasin
should be sent an extra-vigorous telegram:

Unless you buy 15 million poods of grain in January
and February, we shall dismiss you from your
office and expel you from the Party. There is a
desperate need for grain. Red tape is intolerable. The
Vneshtorg apparatus is bad. There are delays over
foreign currency. Do everything you possibly can.
Telegraph precisely on the execution twice a week.
Approve this tomorrow, 20/I, and send on behalf of the
Politbureau,[1] in addition put all the pressure possible
on Litvinov (for the sake of currency) and check up
personally 2 or 3 times a
week.[2]

Notes

[1]On January 20, 1922, the Politbureau of the R.C.P.(B.) Central
Committee recognised the need to intensify the delivery of grain
from the Ukraine and adopted a decision to send Deputy People’s
Commissar for Food, M. I. Frumkin, to the Ukraine with
special powers.

The same decision also approved, with some amendments
(instead of “dismiss from office and expel from the Party”—“the
Party will be forced to take the most drastic measures of
punishment”), the draft telegram to L. B. Krasin proposed by Lenin.
(Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism
of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee).